Solving reverse proxy error ERR_CONTENT_DECODING_FAILED
Configuring a reverse proxy is not an easy task. It involves some trial and error and dealing with unexpected errors. One of those errors is ERR_CONTENT_DECODING_FAILED. The web site won’t load in your browser and Chrome will show this error message:
Error ERR_CONTENT_DECODING_FAILED may show up in your browser when a resource is configured on your reverse proxy, and the backend communication is working. That is: the backend is returning data, but not in a form the browser expects. Like: browser expects a GZIP response, but receives plain text. Therefore the hint content decoding failed. Content received, but the browser is not able to decode / understand the data.
To solve this error, reset the Accept-Encoding request header in your Reverse Proxy configuration.
Apache
RequestHeader unset Accept-Encoding
http://httpd.apache.org/docs/current/mod/mod_headers.html
Example Apache configuration section for a location named test.
<Location /test> RequestHeader unset Accept-Encoding ProxyPass https://0.0.0.0:443 ProxyPassReverse https://0.0.0.0:443/ Order allow,deny Allow from all </Location>
NGINX
proxy_set_header Accept-Encoding "";
http://nginx.org/en/docs/http/ngx_http_proxy_module.html#proxy_set_header
1 Comment
Pascal Poschenrieder · October 31, 2020 at 21:52
Great!!! Thank you very much. You saved us a lot of time 🙂